Introduction

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Want to experiment with OpenFlow SDN, but don’t have any switches? No problem. You can build a simple, but powerful, lab within a virtualised environment. These instructions should hopefully save you a lot of time figuring out the more obtuse features. VirtualBox is used as the hypervisor. Here is a logical diagram of the lab we’re going to build:

images/lab_overview.png

The lab is mainly Ubuntu guests, but also uses a FreeBSD guest. That is the advantage of using a full hypervisor for the lab over containers - you can implement guests with different operating systems.

Pre-Requisites

  • VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/) installed on a suitable host machine
  • Host must have sufficient RAM (test PC was Windows 7 with 8GB RAM)